Poll: 2005 NHL Draft Take Two: Twelfth Overall Pick

Hindsight is an amazing thing, and allows us to look back and wonder “what could have been.” Though perfection is attempted, scouting and draft selection is far from an exact science and sometimes, it doesn’t work out the way teams – or players – intended. For every Patrick Kane, there is a Patrik Stefan.

We’re looking back at the 2005 NHL Draft, which kicked off the salary cap era and ushered in many of the current NHL superstars. The question we’re looking to answer is knowing now what we didn’t know then, how different would this draft look now with the benefit of hindsight?

Now we move forward to the twelfth pick, which was held by the New York Rangers.

To recap how this works:

We will go through the 2005 NHL Draft and have our readers select, through a voting process, who they think should have been taken with the selection.

The entire first round will be redrafted, spanning picks one through thirty. The new selection is chosen by the majority of votes.

Back in 2005, the Rangers picked blueliner Marc Staal. While the team was hopeful his two-way game from the junior level to the pros, that hasn’t been the case although Staal has been a core player in New York for quite some time as a shutdown defender. He has played in 618 career NHL games – all with the Rangers – which ranks ninth highest among all players drafted in 2005. Of those in front of him in that regard, only three others have played that many games with the team that drafted them. Staal is likely to remain with the team for several more years as he still has five years left on his current contract (including this season) with a cap hit of $5.7MM with some form of no-trade protection in every year of the deal.

With the twelfth pick of the 2005 NHL Redraft, who should the New York Rangers select? Cast your vote below!